


A prehistoric tasting menu

by FlamingoQueen



Series: Fossilized [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (also pronounced "coping mechanisms"), (it's pronounced "coping mechanisms"), Boats, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Cockroaches, Crack Treated Seriously, Dinosaurs, Established Relationship, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Seaside, Spiders, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Time Travel, Vacation, clams, scorpions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 16:23:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21449179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: Bucky shrugs and goes back to spacing cockroaches out on the palm spine. “Variety is important to avoid a nutritional deficit,” he says, like he’s describing how cereal is part of a well-balanced breakfast. “It’s not like we’re eating them alive. Except that first one, I guess. But otherwise, the ethics are sound.”Right. Because the ethics are Steve’s biggest concern about the situation, naturally.(Or: Steve and Bucky taste the Jurassic.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Fossilized [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1489358
Comments: 26
Kudos: 48
Collections: Happy Steve Bingo 2019





	A prehistoric tasting menu

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the fourth installment of the series based on my Happy Steve Bingo card! This is for G4: Food. It might help if you read the earlier parts, but it shouldn't be absolutely necessary.
> 
> Squick warning: Bugs. They eat bugs. Also clams. But bugs are on the menu, and that’s way more distressing than clams, let’s be real here.

“Gotcha!”

Steve’s not sure what he expected to walk back to after his trek to gather what they’re calling juniper berries. This was definitely not it, though. 

Bucky holds up a squirming black-shelled cockroach as long as his palm, gripping it behind the head and along the back so that it can’t fly off or bite him. Its legs wiggle frantically as it tries to escape, and its antennae wave this way and that in a desperate search for safety.

And that’s not so bad. Really. It isn’t. It’s not bad at all. Because _of course_ there are cockroaches in the Jurassic, and _of course_ insects are bigger in the Jurassic, and _of course_ Bucky still enjoys maintaining his lightning-fast reflexes in the Jurassic. Catching some of the zippy “little” cockroaches that skitter all along the forest floor is certainly a way to avoid boredom while Steve stretches his legs and gets some berries. 

It’s a little challenge. Just something to keep busy. Emphasis on “just.”

Steve manages to convince himself of this for exactly the amount of time it takes Bucky to lift a cluster of writhing black legs out of a basket and triumphantly stab the cockroach though the middle lengthwise, pushing it down the palm spine he’s using as a skewer until it joins its thrashing cockroach brethren.

Oh, fuck. Bucky thinks he’s catching their dinner. And because he’s Bucky, and Steve is Steve, and Steve has accepted all of Bucky’s culinary decisions as being final… Bucky actually _ is _ catching their dinner. Which means dinner is cockroaches.

Steve did not sign up for this.

Fish? Yes, sure, absolutely. Raw, fried on a hot rock over a fire, grilled over slats above a fire, smoked, dried. Fish is fish. Steve’s okay with fish. 

Pterodactyls? Well, yes, as it turns out. They taste a little like chicken, and that’s a relief. Something sort of familiar in the middle of a world that is not. 

Those little fluffy things running around, the ones with all the blue feathers, that Bucky has yet to officially name? Also yes. Also taste a little like chicken. Also acceptable on the menu.

He’s been a little less keen on the plants Bucky’s figured out—there are surprisingly few plants around that don’t taste astringent enough to peel paint and/or make for an unpleasant afternoon. And apparently fruit isn’t a thing, yet. There are nuts, though. Sort of. And something close enough to juniper berries as makes little difference that he can tell.

Steve deposits said berries in their little woven palm basket on one of the flat sitting rocks so they won’t be accidentally crushed.

He’d be happy enough to go spend a few days down at the shore of the mystery body of water—big lake? small sea? tiny bit of massive ocean?—learning what the Jurassic has to offer in the shellfish category. Sure, he’s never been all that fond of shellfish, but it’s at least a relatively known quantity where food is concerned. Clams are clams, right?

Roaches, though. He’s not sure this is a culinary leap he’s ready to make. They aren’t _starving_. This isn’t a “so it’s come to this” moment. It _ is _ a moment, though. And they’ve agreed that all moments should be announced so that they can be addressed before they become something worse than a moment.

“Uh, Bucky?” Steve asks, hoping that this isn’t going to become a long conversation that ends with a cockroach in his mouth. “I’m having a what the fuck moment here.”

Bucky looks up from his… kabob… where he’s been gently spacing out the cockroaches, presumably for even cooking. “Is it the bugs, or something else?” He doesn’t even sound slightly concerned about the situation unfolding in his hands.

“Mostly the bugs,” he admits. “And the fact that you’re treating them like they’re food.”

“They _ are _ food.”

“I mean, food for us. To eat. Food that we will eat.”

Steve can’t tell right away whether Bucky’s nod means “ah, an understandable concern, but never fear” or “uh, yeah, because we’re going to eat them.” He hopes it’s the first option, he fears it’s the second option, and his fear is confirmed when Bucky pulls the most recent acquisition off the skewer and bites off its lower half.

Steve can hear the crunch from across the clearing.

Bucky gives it a few chews, his expression mostly bland with a bit of challenge sparkling in his eyes. “They’ll be better cooked,” he says after swallowing. “But still not bad raw. And technically alive. These are hard to kill.”

Steve grimaces. “Right. It’s just that…”

Bucky raises an eyebrow at him, but he doesn’t help fill in the rest of Steve’s sentence.

Steve knows that people eat—will eat—insects in the future. That there are—will be—whole countries, and lots of them, where insects will be as much a part of the food supply as chickens. That insects are full of protein and other things that are good for you. He just never imagined that he would be joining that club himself.

“There are fish, though,” he tries, valiantly ignoring the crunch as Bucky chews up the second half of the cockroach. “In the little stream. Just over… Just over there.” Steve gestures vaguely toward the sound of water. “And dinosaurs are tastier than I thought they’d be.”

Bucky shrugs and goes back to spacing cockroaches out on a second palm spine, already full of wiggling legs and weakly fluttering wings. “Variety is important to avoid a nutritional deficit,” he says, like he’s describing how cereal is part of a well-balanced breakfast. “It’s not like we’re eating them alive. Except that first one, I guess. But otherwise, the ethics are sound.”

Right. Because the ethics are Steve’s biggest concern about the situation, naturally.

“Have you eaten these before?” Steve catches that faint flicker of intent in the way Bucky inhales and cuts him off before he even opens his mouth to toss out whatever sassy retort he’s got in mind. “Not Jurassic cockroaches, Bucky. I mean back home. At any point in the future, have you or will you have eaten a cockroach. In any state of preparation.” That should cover all his anti-sass bases.

Bucky stares at him, either trying to find a loophole to get some sass out after all or internally sulking about Steve’s clarification. It’s hard to tell, sometimes. “Yes,” he finally says. “They’re awful. They taste as bad as they smell. Modern-day cockroaches are not something you want to put in your mouth.”

He waves a third skewer gently, sending all the legs into a frenzy and prompting Steve to wonder just how many of these there are in the basket. “These aren’t that kind of cockroach, as it turns out. Maybe a common ancestor? I don’t know. But _ these _aren’t bad at all. Kind of like grease and nuts. You’ll either like ‘em or learn to like ‘em. ‘Cause they’re everywhere, and they’re a low-risk catch.”

“You thought they were cockroaches, didn’t you?” Steve asks. And yeah, so what if he sounds accusatory. “And that they’d taste horrible. And that you were going to have to pretend to like them.”

Bucky squints at him. “Sort of, maybe, and no.” He shrugs. “They don’t smell like roaches, so I figured they probably wouldn’t taste like cockroaches, and might not even _be_ cockroaches. But I wouldn’t pretend to like them, in any case. If we end up needing to eat some nasty, horrible shit somewhere along the line, we’re going to be honest about it.”

Steve’s not sure the moment’s over—if anything, the what-the-fuck has intensified after watching Bucky eat a live bug—but airing the concern _ does _help. And hearing the confirmation that Bucky’s going the “share everything openly” route just like they’d agreed to do, well, that helps, too.

“So you’re cooking them,” Steve finally manages.

“Hell _ yes_, I’m cooking them.” Bucky shudders. “Haven’t you seen those YouTube videos where there’s like a two-foot-long worm tucked inside a fucking one-inch-long cricket? And it explodes out when the cricket dies like it was a snake in a can all compressed and ready to leap out at you? And it’s been stuffed in there tighter than ought to be possible according to the laws of physics or Tetris?”

Steve stares at him. “What deranged corner of YouTube have _you_ been exploring!?” YouTube videos are for—will be for—learning things and watching kittens and listening to music and… “And _ why?_” 

“The fun part,” Bucky mutters. “Clearly.”

“…that doesn’t explain why…”

Bucky scoops up one of the not-cockroach kabobs that’s making a coordinated run for it up the side of the basket, and plops it back inside. “No,” he says primly. “It doesn’t.”

And that’s clearly the end of that conversation.

* * *

On the one hand, it’s nice that they’ve spent the day at this prehistoric beach after yesterday’s not-cockroach feast. On the other hand, he can see the ideas forming in Bucky’s head, and he can tell they aren’t ideas he’s going to like.

It had been relaxing—sort of—sitting out in the sand and watching the waves come in, watching the pterodactyls swoop and circle above the water. Almost like a beach back home, if the seagulls were bigger, meaner, louder… 

Sometimes they’d fight over a morsel, one pterodactyl deciding that ambushing another pterodactyl was easier than hunting a fish for itself. And sometimes they’d return to shore instead of bolting the fish down on the wing, holding the fish down with the finger part of their wings and ripping off bits of meat.

And there’s nothing Steve’s seen that’s more awkward and gangly than a grounded pterodactyl. They’re fast enough to hop a few paces and take to the sky again if startled, but those hops are nothing anywhere near graceful. 

A flying pterodactyl is like an agile self-propelled kite soaring and dipping in the breeze. A pterodactyl in the sand is like a newborn deer on uneven stilts.

He’d half expected Bucky to snag one of them, maybe even a few. There’s hardly anything in this area that moves and is shorter than they are that Bucky hasn’t made a decent attempt to turn into dinner. The line seems to be mammals. Bucky will kill and eat anything that isn’t a mammal.

And by extension, Steve will eat anything that isn’t a mammal.

Including crunchy, leggy, nutty, smoked “mockroaches” off a skewer. In Bucky’s defense, they actually _ had _ been pretty tasty. Like the very tip of a greasy fried chicken wing, if the batter was made out of ground cashews and the frying oil was just the wrong side of rancid.

They were edible, and way better than some of the plants. Steve’s man enough to admit when he’s wrong. In his defense, though, the legs are really off-putting and watching them all twitching together and gradually folding up into classic dead bug pose… they aren’t _ that _ tasty.

Maybe if Bucky tore the legs off and Steve didn’t hear them scratching and scrabbling against each other before getting arranged near the fire. Maybe.

But there are lots of prehistoric clams, and some things Steve is choosing to think of as crabs and not spiders, despite the bulbous bodies. So they’ve had some luck piling up a basket full of shellfish for later. In the name of variety, Steve is looking forward to the clam bake much more than he had to the mockroach roast.

So much more.

But now there’s Bucky frowning at the ocean, or maybe sea, or maybe large lake. There’s Bucky thinking thoughts as he eyes the pterodactyls wheeling about overhead. There’s Bucky planning plans. 

And if Steve knows anything about Bucky after all this time and all the things Bucky’s been through both with Steve and on his own, it’s that Bucky needs to air those thoughts out or they will become an unstoppable paranoia festival of some sort, and Bucky might not even know it.

“Well,” Steve says, scooping up sand to make into a castle of a sort. It won’t distract Bucky from anything, and it won’t hide Steve’s intent, but it’ll be fun. It’s been ages since he built a sand castle. And this will be the planet’s very first sand castle. What a momentous occasion.

Bucky makes a sound in the back of his throat, just acknowledging Steve rather than fully engaging.

“See anything worth naming?” He’s going to have a mote around his castle. Maybe make a little drawbridge.

It takes Bucky nearly a minute to answer, and when he does, it’s as though he’s being roused from sleep rather than thought. “No.” He turns his attention from the water to Steve and the beginnings of the castle. Bucky blinks, eyeing the castle and still looking like his mind’s fairly far away.

“We’re going to make a boat,” Bucky says, once he’s fully present. He sounds far more determined than Steve would like.

“…a boat.”

“Yeah.” He nods a few times, slowly, mentally putting the final touches on the plan Steve has failed to catch soon enough to stop. “Nothing elaborate because we don’t know what we’re doing. But more than a raft.”

Steve nods along, more trying to follow the statement backward to a logical launching pad than agreeing with it. “Why?”

Bucky jerks his chin toward the water. “I want to know what else is out there. Down the coast. And it gets too soupy to walk the shoreline that far. We could sail it, though.”

“I don’t know how to sail _ anything_, Buck. I tipped over the last five canoes I tried to get into. I haven’t even seen a kayak I’d fit in.” Steve raises his eyebrows and tilts his head a little. “I could go on, but…”

Bucky waves off the concern. “I can sail. But it’s not like that’s going to help us any more than your lack of seafaring know-how is going to hurt us. We aren’t making a boat-boat. And it’s sure as fuck not going to have a fucking motor or any of that. Or sails. Probably not even a rudder at first.”

He looks thoughtfully over the water. “Maybe after I take down one of the long-necks out on the plains, we’ll have anything pliable enough and also big enough to be a sail. And I could swear we saw a stegosaur back when we first showed up. Those plates might be good for steering.” Bucky shrugs. “We’ll skin that problem when we get to it.”

Steve makes himself pat some sand onto his castle instead of staring at Bucky with an open mouth. He pats sand, and pats more sand, until his thoughts are a bit clearer. 

“What I’m hearing,” he says, “is that you want us to cut down some trees that are bigger around than we are tall, but without a saw, or an ax, or anything but a handful of knives. And then turn those trees into a boat, but without knowing how and without any tools and without any nails.” At least, he assumes nails are one of the things you’d need to build a boat.

“And _then_,” he continues, “kill a dinosaur that’s so tall we don’t come up to its knees, so we can turn that dinosaur into a sail. And find and kill another dinosaur we’ve only ever seen once, to hack off parts of it for paddles, or whatever a rudder is.”

Steve applies more sand to his castle. “For the boat we don’t know how to make out of trees we probably can’t cut down. So we can teach ourselves how to not die in a body of water we know exactly nothing about aside from the fact that it’s wet and salty.”

He pauses, and he’d like to say it’s for emphasis, but the truth is, he’s appalled by hearing it all laid out.

Bucky considers that for a moment, and then nods, clearly not seeing the same thing Steve is seeing. “Pretty much, but without the air of hopelessness. Take that out and replace it with a sense of adventure.”

“Adventure.”

“Steve, babe. We’re already the first humans on this planet. Why can’t we also be the first sailors?”

And, actually, there isn’t really any reason at all they can’t be. Except that one of them doesn’t know the first thing about sailing and the other has probably only ever sailed Russian spy boats or whatever. But…

“How soon do you see this happening, Bucky?”

Bucky shrugs. “Didn’t get that far.”

Well, at least he’s still being honest and open.

“Figure we’ll work our way up to a boat-boat. Start with something like a dinghy, maybe a canoe, make sure there’s lots of rope, put one of us out on the water with the other sort of playing anchor…” Bucky shrugs again. “Sitting on the shore, we’ve got some clams and sea spiders—”

“_Crabs_,” Steve interrupts, with just a touch of desperation.

Bucky blinks. “Sure. Crabs. But we aren’t going to have much luck _really_ fishing unless we get out further than wading depth. And any farther out than that, the tide is going to be a bitch. Unless we’re out _on_ the water and not _in_ it.”

Yes, alright. Good point. “I thought we were doing alright fishing in that creek.”

“For little guys, yeah. I want to haul something up big enough that we’re not still hungry when we finish eating. Like that little long-neck a few weeks back.”

“Well,” Steve says, slowly, tasting his words before committing to them. He’s got to be careful about this. If he’s not, they’ll end up on a boat in one month with Bucky catching rainwater in a dinosaur pelt, and _ then _ how are they going to get home again? What if they try the symbols at sea and are zapped back in the middle of the modern Pacific? How does _that_ help them?

“A big fish _ would _be a lot less cute than a baby long-neck.” Steve will allow that. That’s safe to say. That’s not enough to send them out on a boat in one month’s time.

Bucky makes a see-saw gesture with his hand. “Eh. Depends on the fish, probably. I’ve seen some damn cute fish over the years.”

* * *

“So the verdict is ‘if we can catch it, or we can carry it, and _ especially _if we can cook it, it’s food.’” Steve raises his eyebrows. “Do I have that right?”

“Spot on.” Bucky deftly plucks a freshly opened clam out of the coals with a pair of knife-smoothed pine chopsticks and drops it onto the pile with the others.

He’s about halfway through cooking their little Jurassic clam bake, and he’s got what Steve is firmly calling a lobster chopped into pieces and hissing away in the coals as well. So what if the lobster is the length of Steve’s arm and has a massive stinger on the end of its narrow tail? It came out of the water, and it’s not round-ish like the crabs—_not _ sea spiders—and that makes it lobster.

Unfortunately, with three crabs and a dozen fist-sized clams apiece, they are still bound to be hungry after dinner, even accounting for the lobster. A super soldier needs a lot more in the tank than most.

Snagging the prehistoric equivalent of a tuna is sounding better and better, even if they have to build a boat to do it. Those fish are supposed to be big in modern times. The Jurassic tuna is at least not likely to be smaller. A tuna would keep them fed.

Steve sighs wistfully. “Do you think there are tuna out there, Buck?” 

Bucky nudges another three clams into the coals, hinge down. “Probably not tuna-tuna. Maybe dinosaur tuna. Ancestral tuna.”

“Ancestral tuna,” Steve says, laughing. “I think I want to go out there and catch some ancestral tuna, Bucky.”

“And maybe some ancestral swordfish, and a bunch of squid, and maybe—”

“What, the squid aren’t ancestral?”

Bucky cocks his head and frowns into the coals for a moment. “I think squid are already squid, like the clams are already clams.”

“And crabs are already crabs.” Steve meets Bucky’s gaze steadily, both daring him to and pleading with him _not_ _to_ correct him on that.

Bucky looks at the swollen abdomen of the crab still on the coals, and then back at Steve. “I’m willing to call these ancestral crabs. But you _ know _they’re fucking spiders, Steve.”

Steve shakes his head. “They’re a missing link. Between the one and the other. The disgustingly inedible and the expensively luxuriant delicacy.”

“If that’s what’ll help you digest at night.”

* * *

Prehistoric lobster tastes like salty mud. It’s stringier than modern lobster, too. But Steve has to admit that it’s filling, and that stringier texture not nearly as off-putting as mockroach legs, so he imagines he’ll be eating a lot of it, whenever they can lure one out of the water. He doesn’t want to get in the water _with_ it, not with that stinger.

Prehistoric crab tastes… sort of like seaweed. And the legs are actually pretty crabby, which is a huge bonus that nevertheless doesn’t outweigh the chewy abdominal portion of the crab. Unlike the meaty claws of the prehistoric lobster or modern crabs, that bit is hardly meat at all, and is a challenge to get down, and has little white sticky bits inside that pull away like elastic cheese in a pizza commercial without being anything at all like cheese. It might still come back up if he thinks about it too much.

But clams are thankfully clams. Salty, chewy, a little bit sandy, and clam all the way through. The only weird bit is how big these ones are. Steve’s not used to clams that take more than two bites to get down. In any case, getting some salt in his belly is worth the lengthy trek to the shore, even if the trip brings back muddy lobsters and… chewy crab butts along with the clams.

Bucky’s kept the clam shells, and Steve can imagine a dozen or more different uses he’ll put them to. Already, he’s using a pointy rock to grind a hole in one of them. Wind chime, decoration, sinker for a twine fishing line… could be anything. Only time will tell.

“Not a bad haul, really,” Steve says, leaning against the rock face beside their shallow cave. “I’ve had better lobster, and the texture on that crab leaves a little something to be desired, but the clams would get five stars from me.”

Bucky laughs and keeps twisting rock against shell. “We should use that paper to write the planet’s first Michelin Guide. Sea scorpions, zero stars, do not recommend.” He looks up, his expression dropping from amusement to chagrin. “Sorry. Ancestral lobster, I mean.”

“No, no,” Steve says, waving the concern away. He vastly prefers laughing Bucky over guilty Bucky. “Those ones, I have to admit aren’t lobsters.” He makes a stabbing motion with one hand. “Unless they’re death lobsters. With the stingers.”

“Okay,” Bucky says, gradually getting back into the lighter mood. “Death lobsters. I like that. Your first designation. It’s a proud moment.” He blows shell dust away from his work and inspects it. “We’ll have to avoid stepping on those guys, you know. Zap. Stinger in your foot. That’s a bad day.”

Steve concedes the point. “Well that’s that. They’re off the menu and good riddance.” He brushes his hands together.

Bucky chuckles. “We’ll still eat ‘em if we catch one, Steve. Muddy meat, stinger, and all.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, hoping they never catch another one. “But zero stars.”

“Definitely.”


End file.
